Monday, February 02, 2004
First Sony Blu-Ray recoder sales scheduled for May

The first Blu-Ray recorder (405nm) from Sony is scheduled to hit the market on May,2004.Two
different models will be available and are mainly addressed for professional and business
data archieve. The Sony BW-RS101 will offer an Ultra 160 SCSI interface, while the second
model (June 2004) will be equiped with USB 2.0 interface. The SCSI model will cost 3,200 EUR
and the price for the USB 2.0 version is expected to be 200 EUR higher. The company will
also launch auto disk-loaders for both drive models.

The supported media are made by Sony. The PDDRW23 series (rewritable-single sided) offers a
23.3GB capacity, as well as the PDDWO23 series (write-once).

Both drives use a Blu-Ray laser diode (405nm) to achieve high density recording. In
addition, with numerical aperture set to 0.85, the provided recording capacities reach the
23.3GB per disk side.

Data rates reach the 9MB/s when writing, which is almost twice the currently available for
DVD-RW and approximately 1.5 times higher than the magneto-Optical devices. Furthermore, the
maximum data rate for reading reaches the 11MB/s.